That, and if you want to raise a family, what kind of role models and community surrounds your children is important.
I do care about rape, assault, and murder. I don't ever want to be caught up in that. So I was very glad to learn that though my small town has an above average murder rate, it's between people who don't associate with me.
A) A friend's sister who got addicted to crack and was murdered by a guy her bf pissed off. He was caught.
B) One of my previous bosses had a cousin murdered in a domestic terrorist attack.
I associate Col/Mex deaths with cartels warring over trafficking routes but what is happening in Brazil? Is it just street trade?
And 5% of those were in Chicago alone.
[1] https://www.thetrace.org/2018/04/highest-murder-rates-us-cit...
Yet mass shootings are becoming dramatically more common.
What I find curious is that while the Brazilian murder rate is about 6 or 7 times that in the US, the rate of firearm related deaths is 'only' double. Is firearm suicide dramatically more common in the US, or are a lot of the murders perpetrated in Brazil not firearm related? It just seems odd.
https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-america/ Nearly two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides.5 The U.S. gun suicide rate is eight times that of other high-income countries.6 Access to a gun increases the risk of death by suicide by three times.7 Gun suicides are concentrated in states with high rates of gun ownership.8 Most people who attempt suicide do not die—unless they use a gun. Across all suicide attempts not involving a firearm, less than five percent will result in death.9 But for gun suicides, those statistics are flipped: approximately 85 percent of gun suicide attempts end in death
Lots of the murders in Brazil are firearms related and it has very strong gun-control laws. The average citizen is not allowed to own a gun.
http://www.chicagonow.com/getting-real/2017/07/chicagos-safe...
It might be more appropriate to compare the most violent neighborhood in Chicago to the most violent neighborhood in a similarly-sized Venezuelan city. Just as you would compare the safest neighborhoods in both cities.
Imagine how bad Caracas is, given that the population is roughly the same (or a little larger than Chicago's). There are no official numbers for Caracas as the government "chose" not to report. But Chicago has a 15.65 murde rate vs. a +110 in Caracas (per 100 000).
I don't even want to think what's the rate for the equivalent of Engelwood in Caracas :(
So the city is in some cases MORE safe than the less urban areas, the main reason for this drop was a drop in gang violence based on the consolidation and dominant victory of a single gang. That gang is the PCC.
In areas where multiple gangs are still fighting for control the violence can be incredible.
I was giving context of what that number means. Not claiming Chicago is more violent than Caracas.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/09/08/homici...
Even in Brazil I bet a lot of this happens in communities, where they can try to justify violence due to some perceived slight.
And of course let's not forget that America's crazy gun laws are pushed by gun lobbies because they help increase sales by creating an easy way to funnel guns into South and Central America.
Much of the violence is there because of things like The School of the Americas and the work of US interests in promoting less democratic states to make it easier to gather resources (see the book: Confessions of an Economic Hitman). While it may not be directly related to the gang violence, those policies do spill over and make this sort of trend easier.
Could we please stick to facts? US gun laws have essentially no impact on this issue. Based on murder rates, it would seem like Brazil is the place with "crazy" gun laws. Shifting responsibility for Brazil's violence to US gun manufacturers is intellectually dishonest. Ultimately, Brazilians are pulling triggers and they're pulling triggers of mostly Brazilian weapons.
US gun makers sell a lot more guns to Americans than Brazilians, yet Brazil has 63,880 homicides? The US had 17,250 homicides and over 125 million more people. The idea that Brazilian homicides are because of US gun makers is just absurd.
Homicide rates don't directly correlate to gun availability. Mexico had 29,168 homicides in 2017 with a population of 200 million fewer people than in the US. And Mexico has some of the strictest gun laws anywhere. Venezuela has the third highest murder rate in the world and the influence of the US gun lobby is non-existent. Most weapons there have some sort of Soviet/Cuban/socialist origin. You won't find too many Smith and Wesson's on the streets of Caracas.
Venezuela passed the "Control of Arms, Munitions and Disarmament Law" with the stated aim of disarming all citizens, with prison sentences up to 20 years for even possessing a gun. And what happened? The homicide rate rose from 73 per 100k to 90 per 100k (despite Maduro being known from undercounting crime.) Correlation doesn't imply causation of course, but the point is that Venezuela's homicide rates have nothing to do with the US gun lobby. It's absurd to even make such a connection.
In Brazil, over 68% of guns seized by police were manufactured by Brazilian government subsidized firms including Taurus, Rossi, IMBEL and CBC. Most of these guns were purchased or stolen from Brazil. My 68% number comes from 2014, but here's a report from 2011-2012 that shows similar numbers: http://www.soudapaz.org/upload/file/relatorio_armas_do_crime...
The point is that some political cheap shot on US gun laws and the "gun lobby" isn't even relevant to this problem in Brazil. In terms of "assault" rifles, an AK-47 is more common in Brazil than US-manufactured weapons. So we could just as as much argue that leftist-government gun policies are just as much to blame since AK-47s are vestiges of the Soviet-Cuban-backed socialist revolutionary groups from the 1980s. But even that argument is weak considering the vast majority of weapons used in Brazilian violent crime are handguns of Brazilian origin.
The point is, Brazilian violent crime is a Brazilian problem. Dragging US gun laws into this debate is just ridiculous since such an assertion isn't backed by any actual data.
Strict gun laws don't necessarily equal less gun availability.
You have to look at how effectively those gun laws are enforced, how much corruption there is in the country, gun law loopholes, the viability of the black/gray markets, etc.
The US has a much lower level of corruption than a country like Mexico, so gun laws in the US have the potential to be much more strictly enforced. The US also has many more resources to devote to stamping out the black/gray markets for guns than Mexico does.
There's also infiltration by criminals of much of Mexico's government. It's a case of the fox guarding the hen house. No wonder their gun laws are not effective.
What? The Bill of Rights was that prescient? I assume it is our freedom of the press that’s responsible for the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf?
There were only around 13,000 murders last year in the US, a number that used to be more like 26,000 during the crack epidemic 30 years ago. US population has increased by 10s of millions since then, but murders continue to drop.
Additonally, 90% of murders occur between people who know each other in some form, be it neighbors or classmates. Being robbed at gunpoint on the street or in your apartment and then shot to death is quite rare, especially if you arent in places like Memphis, Detroit, Chicago, NOLA, Cleveland, St Louis.
The USA certainly isn't perfect but I was thrilled to get a good price on a great apartment in what everyone else calls "the hood". I will take my chances that I won't be the unlucky 1 out of 11,000 people who is shot here every year.